xonovex Accessibility Assurance
Make accessibility a versioned, testable quality and governance concern without requiring one platform, scanner, or conformance claim.
Essentials
- Pin the target: record the standard, version, level, applicable criteria, exact subject revision, environments, and user journeys, see references/assessment-and-evidence.md
- Design with affected users: include perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust outcomes from discovery through content and interaction design, see references/design-and-implementation.md
- Layer the evidence: combine deterministic inspection, automated checks, keyboard and zoom testing, representative assistive technology, and qualified human review, see references/assessment-and-evidence.md
- Publish criterion outcomes: report pass, fail, not-applicable, and not-tested with origins, limitations, findings, gaps, freshness, and native references, see references/assessment-and-evidence.md
- Govern exceptions and drift: scope, own, expire, review, remediate, reassess, and retire accessibility decisions, see references/governance-and-operations.md
- Keep tools in their lane: platform skills own implementation APIs; scanners and agents provide evidence but never accountable conformance by themselves
Gotchas
- An automated scanner covers only what it can observe; a clean report is not proof that every applicable criterion passes.
not-applicableneeds a criterion-specific reason and reviewer; it is not a synonym for untested or inconvenient.- Conformance applies to the declared subject, scope, version, level, and dependencies. A changed UI, content path, component, platform, or assistive-technology environment may invalidate evidence.
- An exception preserves a known gap and remediation duty. It never changes a failed criterion into a pass or establishes conformance.
- Crosswalks between accessibility standards, laws, and design guidance are contextual; they do not establish equivalence, certification, or legal compliance.
Example
Target: checkout@sha256:abc · WCAG 2.2 AA · authenticated web journey
Evidence: deterministic markup checks + scanner@4.2 + keyboard/zoom + two AT/browser pairs
Outcome: 43 pass · 1 fail · 6 not applicable · 2 not tested
Decision: release blocked by profile; finding owned; scoped alternative access expires in 14 days
Reassess: exact fixed revision plus regression of adjacent journeys
Progressive Disclosure
- Read references/design-and-implementation.md - Load when defining inclusive requirements, user journeys, content, interaction, platform ownership, or implementation handoffs
- Read references/assessment-and-evidence.md - Load when selecting applicable criteria, planning tests, assessing an exact revision, grading outcomes, or publishing accessibility evidence
- Read references/governance-and-operations.md - Load when composing profiles, release gates, exceptions, remediation, monitoring, drift, incident response, or retirement